This is a collection of one page stories brought together in one document available for free download. Each page/story corresponds with a day of the week, although the stories themselves have no connection with one another. The stories include moral lessons. Each story is fully voweled.
This website hosts many examples of poetry from the jahiliyyah period to the present in an attempt to create a comprehensive diwan of Arabic poetry. Some poems have an audio component. Users can browse poetry by time period, by audio file, by author's name, or by custom search. The website is also in English and there are many poems that have been translated into English, although some poems that are on the website in English are not on the website in Arabic and vice versa. Users can submit poetry to the website via a submission system.
Al Wzzan is a website aimed at analyzing Arabic poetry. Users can type any verse into the search field, and the website will identify it's meter, or "bahar." Arabic poetry traditionally falls within one of fifteen different meters. The site also provides sample stanzas of poetry to demonstrate how the programs works.
Arab Culture through Literature and Film is a five unit high school curriculum that provides students with knowledge and tools toanalyze and understand the Arab world. The materials utilize a student-centered pedagogical approach that promotes critical thinking and respect and encourages engaged global citizenship. Through this curriculum, students will recognize shared themes across the region and gain a sense of the rich diversity inherent to the multidimensional cultures of the Arab world. Students will study life and culture in the Arab world and engage with primary sources including films, short stories, and poems. Exposing students to Arab voices and putting human faces on the Arab world will increase understanding and tolerance in the American classroom.
Across the Arab world, kinship and familial association are cornerstones of society and the experience of every individual. Though each kin group functions in a unique way, there is a pervasive pattern of reliance on family networks regardless of religion, gender, ethnicity, or class. This unit explores concepts and structures of family in Arab societies from a variety of angles. Students will explore Jordanian customs and consider the values behind them and their relation to family. They will also hear from gay and lesbian Middle Easterners who reflect on their concepts of family and its impact on their coming-out processes. Students will read select short stories and poems and watch Ajami, a film in which the plot is fueled by character reactions to their families' needs. In the final lesson of this unit, students will synthesize all of the lessons above to create an Arab kinship themed version of Chutes and Ladders that demonstrates the role of kinship in setting and realizing individual goals.
This curriculum understands gender and gender roles as social constructs that are built, defined, and fulfilled on an individual and societal level. These roles are both an outcome of and rationale for appearance, behavior, and interactions of individuals and groups. Such concepts of gendered behavior are impacted by various factors including one's age, geographic location, social class, religion, marital status, and ethnicity. In this unit, students explore the dynamics of gender in the Arab world and consider their varied manifestations, perhaps challenging traditional notions of gender in the region. Students will explore the nuances of gendered interactions in public and private space and the pressures that gender expectations may place on individuals in the region. By engaging with texts and stories from the region, students will consider how those traditional expectations are negotiated and contested in a variety of ways.
The Arab world is a large and diverse region that spans from Morocco in the west, through the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula. It includes twenty-three countries and represents a wide range of customs, traditions, and cultures. This unit frames the region through the lens of cultural unity and diversity, a concept essential to this curriculum. The historical and cultural background provided in this unit serves as a foundation for students to identify and understand the nuances and complexities of the region. Additionally, students are introduced to the primary tool used for cultural analysis of the Arab world throughout the curriculum, the culture as an iceberg metaphor.
Though the Arab world is broadly defined by a shared Arab ethnicity, there are actually a variety of ethnic groups in the region, many of whom are indigenous to the land. Each of these ethnic groups, including the Amazigh, the Bedouin, the Nubians, and the Kurds, has a unique history and culture and often their own language as well. Since the early years of Arab expansion, these indigenous groups have negotiated their acceptance and integration into the dominant Arab culture, at times adopting elements of the culture and at other times, rejecting it. This unit introduces students to ethnic groups in the Arab world and guides them through an understanding of their lived experience as minorities in the region. Students will consider the challenges that face specific ethnicities and explore how these groups negotiate their collective identity and membership in the region. Students will study the activity of Amazigh activists, read Kurdish poetry, and watch a documentary about the Nubians. They'll end the unit by conducting independent research on an ethnic minority of their choosing.
Religion permeates through the cultures and societies of the Arab world, manifesting itself in diverse ways. Its presence is seen at an institutional level as well as in personal behaviors and interactions including dress, daily routines, and patterns of speech. Although religion is ubiquitous, the way individuals understand and practice their religion varies widely. Furthermore, while Islam is the predominant religion of the region, religious sentiment pervades broadly and a host of other religions are practiced throughout the region. This unit guides students through an understanding of religion in the Arab world within its own cultural context. It challenges students to consider the complexities of religion and religious expression in a region in which its presence is unavoidable. This unit exposes students to diverse religious practices and expressions of Islam and the relationships between religious practitioners in the region.
This blog is an initiative to celebrate and recognize Arab women writers, promote awareness of the breadth of their contributions to Arab and world culture, and create a focal point for information related to Arab women writers and their work. Information on books, generations of authors, a suggested reading list, references, upcoming events, and more is all available via the website. Books discussed have all been translated into English.
First published in the 19th century, the Arabic-English Lexicon by Edward William Lane remains one of the widely used resources for classical Arabic - English translation. Entries are based on the root system and are exhaustive, often including examples of the use of the word in classical poetry and other classical texts. This online version allows the scholar to utilize the 8 volume dictionary by searching the root via the Arabic letters on the left hand side of the page. The site shows scanned images from the corresponding pages of the print version of the lexicon.
This blog offers translations of Arabic songs into English. Arabic transcriptions of the song lyrics are also provided, as are the transliterated lyrics. Where possible, the song has been added to the website as well so that users can listen to the song as well as read along. Users can request new songs to be translated, submit their own translations, and leave comments. Users can also search the site or click on a singer's name to be given a list of their songs that have been translated on the site.
The Bedouins of ancient Arabia and Persia made poetry a conversational art form. Several poetic forms developed from the participatory nature of tribal poetry. Today in most Arabic cultures, you may still experience public storytelling and spontaneous poetry challenges in the streets. The art of turning a rhyme into sly verbal sparring is considered a mark of intelligence and a badge of honor. Students will learn about the origins and structure of Arabic Poetry.
This web site contains many short stories and texts in Arabic. Hundreds of writers from more than twenty different countries are currently participating in this project. To access the stories, the user chooses an author and then a text from among the titles that the author has provided for the site.
This page offers 186 different children's stories written in Arabic. Topics range from scientific matters such as how to build a telescope to literature and folktales, including Indian folktales. Stories must be viewed using Java and users must click on the link to view the resource and its title. Many contain images and other illustrations. The intended age level of the reader varies from story to story.
CultureTalk - Arab World features native speakers from across the Arabic-speaking world giving filmed interviews, in Arabic and sometimes English, on selected topics. Text-based translations and transcriptions are often provided as downloadable documents for most Arabic videos. The videos engage a number of region/country-specific topics, including cultural traditions, religion, politics, and sports.
This art history video discussion examines the "Mihrab" (prayer niche), 1354--55 (A.H. 755), just after the Ilkhanid period, Isfahan, Iran, polychrome glazed tiles, 135-1/16 x 113-11/16 inches / 343.1 x 288.7 cm (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
In this packet we look at works that span nearly a thousand yearsäóîfrom shortly after the foundation of Islam in the seventh century to the seventeenth century when the last two great Islamic empiresäóîthe Ottoman and the Safavidäóîhad reached their peak. Although the definition of Islamic art usually includes work made in Mughal India, it is beyond the scope of this packet. The works we will look at here come from as far west as Spain and as far east as Afghanistan.
This resource provides a variety of information and activities that teachers may like to use with their students to explore the Islamic Middle East collections at the V&A. It can be used to support learning in Maths and Art. Included in this resource are sections on:
Principles of Islamic art and design
Pre-visit activities
Activities to do in the museum
Activities to do back at school
Islamic art explores the geometric systems that depend upon the regular division of the circle and the study of Islamic art increases appreciation and understanding of geometry. The use of these geometric systems creates a harmony among Islamic decorative arts and architecture, which is consistent with the Islamic belief that all creation is harmoniously interrelated.
Approaching an abstract subject in a concrete way provides a means of extending maths into other curriculum areas. The context of the Museum expands and enriches students' appreciation of the application of geometry in a cultural context and develops the sense of different cultural identities. Students have the opportunity to become familiar with the relationship between geometry and design and this can give confidence to students who have never seen themselves as 'good at art'.
Nizar Qabbani is a famous Syrian contemporary poet. This website is dedicated to Nizar's literature. In the poetry and poems section, there are 510 poems about love, feminism, religion, and Arab nationalism. Many singers sang the poems of Nizar; this site includes twenty of these songs. Four works of prose by Nizar are included on the website, in addition to some pictures of Nizar and what people said about him. The website is entirely in Arabic.
Poets' Gate is a website that contains examples of Arabic poetry ranging from the jahiliyyah period to the present day in an attempt to create a comprehensive diwan (or compilation) of Arabic poetry. Poems are divided according to the time periods and poets. The site also provides biographic information about the poets and a full list of their poems.
This blog is for children, parents, and anyone else interested in Arabic children's books. There is information about children's literature awards, summer reading suggestions for kids, reviews of children's books, and more. The blog's author also posts news about children's literature, such as when big websites are having sales and when new websites for children are launched.
This is the third volume in Thornton's Arabic Series. It contains more advanced readings that have only limited footnotes to explain vocabulary and grammatical issues. According to the work's author, the passages presented in this book were selected and placed in chronological order for the purpose of demonstrating the social and literary development of Arab civilization during the classical period. The book includes a glossary.
This is the final text in Thornton's Arabic Series. It contains numerous literary extracts from classical Arabic sources along with explanatory footnotes. Selections come from the Qur'an, classical travel literature, poems, historical sources, some religious texts, grammatical texts, and biographies. A glossary is included.
This blog is devoted to providing resources to teachers and students of Arabic. The website is run by an Arabic-English-Russian teacher and translator living in the U.K. This blog aims to share cultural and topical resources with lots of ideas for Arabic lessons or for studying alone. It also contains reviews of online resources and books, details of Arabic-language events, recommendations of novels, films, music, and so forth. The author also occasionally posts information about jobs. The blog is searchable.
This site provides a description of Arabic aimed at a younger audience which includes the language's history, its famous authors, where it's spoken, common phrases and traditional expressions. The text emphasizes general information over language instruction.
The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Initiative (YMDI) is a collective of research librarians and leading scholars of classical Islam, Middle Eastern history, and Arabic Literature whose mission is to preserve the Arabic manuscripts in the private libraries of Yemen. This website is the home page through which users can explore more than 100 digitized manuscripts, including topics such as law, arithmetic, medicine, Islamic studies, and more.
ArabiCorpus is an enormous, searchable corpus of Arabic literature that allows the user to find Arabic words in the contexts in which they are used by native writers. The corpus database includes material from newspapers, modern literature, classical sources, and Egyptian colloquial sources. Users can limit their search to be as specific as they wish. Search terms can be entered in Arabic or with Latin character transliterations. Users must create a login account in order to view detailed information and instructions for using the corpus.